The invention is based on a priority application EP 05003502.1 which is hereby incorporated by reference.
The present invention relates to a method for providing harmonized public security and safety services to a plurality of public security and safety control centers.
The communication tools used by security and safety services as police, fire departments, rescue services have to be efficient in order to react as soon as possible to emergency and involve in the communication the whole team which needs to intervene in the field.
Examples of services that such communication tools must be able to provide can be:                Receiving emergency calls and triggering broadcast calls to a pre-selected group of professionals located in the neighborhood of the person having placed the emergency call.        Alarming a group of professionals over a plurality of possible communication devices (dedicated radio terminal, public mobile phone, pager).        Making group calls for a group of professionals to be kept on the same level of information, and possibly defining a coordinator who has priority in the group call.        Sending and receiving Short Data Messages containing information relevant for the professionals in the field.        
These communication tools usually comprise a plurality of public security and safety control centers which are connected to a dedicated Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) network. Up to the last decade such PMR networks were most analog and not interconnected. Each region and each security and safety organization had its own PMR. Due to political decisions, the trend is now to equip the different European countries with digital PMR networks and to provide a “unifying” infrastructure capable of interconnecting multiple organizations or of interoperating at borders with other national networks in order to enhance the mutual cooperation between European countries.
The digital PMR networks are usually based on one of the following technologies: TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), TETRAPOL, GSM with ASCI features.
The current PMR landscape is a juxtaposition of heterogeneous technologies as analog PMR coexists with digital ones compatible to different standards. FIG. 1 illustrates the state of the art PMR landscape. FIG. 1 represent a plurality of islands of control centers CO1, . . . , CO4 each island of control centers being associated to one organization for example CO1 groups control centers of the fire department, CO2 central centers of the police region 1 and CO3 central centers of the police region 2 and CO4 central centers of emergency services.
Each island of central centers are relying on one or more transport technologies. For example, CO1 is connected to an analog PMR, CO2 to a TETRA PMR and a paging network, CO3 to a GSM/UMTS PMR and CO4 to a WLAN network.
A drawback of the current situation is that the services implemented at the control centers must be adapted to the underlying transport network in order to work. An application working in a TETRA PMR cannot be ported to another type of PMR without expensive and time intensive adaptation or replacement. The PMR are proprietary solutions without unifying a network between the control centers is the latter are not relying on the same transport technology. As a consequence, harmonized services may remain a cost intensive burden.
A particular object of the present invention is to provide a method for providing harmonized public security and safety services over a plurality of access communication networks.
Another object of the invention is to provide a corresponding service platform.